Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs

Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States.

His photographs — most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved — provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century.

The Jackson Davis Collection consists of papers and photographs, given to Special Collections , in 1948 by Helen Mansfield Lynch and Ruth Elizabeth Langhorne, Davis’s daughters, and supplemented in 1999 by Sally Guy Browne and Helen Langhorne, Davis’s granddaughters.

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Longtime supporters of the University and the Library, Albert ('46) and Shirley Small made a substantial gift toward the construction of the special collections library that bears their name and houses Mr. Small's remarkable collection of autograph documents and rare, early printings of the Declaration of Independence